14

The next morning, I got up early and made my way to the Point G Hospital. I asked for the morgue and was told to go to the basement. Once there I didn’t have to look hard for the room. I relied on my sense of smell and my memory from my years on the police force. At the end of the tiled hallway, I approached a guy in a grayish coat that had probably been white at some point. He was roughly the same age as Drissa. I explained that I was there to claim Mr. Diallo’s body. He listened intently while chewing on something and asked me to repeat the last name of the deceased.

“Diallo,” I said.

He consulted his register, which listed hundreds of names. Seeing that this could take ages, I added that he had died the night before. The old hospital worker’s finger continued down the list of dead people. It would pause at every Diallo, and every time I would tell him that it wasn’t the right Diallo. I was looking for a man named Drissa. Finally, he reached the end of the list and tapped triumphantly on the entry “Drissa Diallo, born May 9, 1948, deceased May 8, 2009.”

He had died the night before his birthday. I claimed the body, and the guy stood up without asking me what relation I was to the deceased. He didn’t ask me to show an ID. He just wanted me to fill out the form. As I strained to carry out the task using an old chewed-up pen, he grabbed a set of keys hanging from a nail on the wall. He glanced at what I had written and nodded.

We headed toward the double doors, and after he unlocked them, we entered the morgue itself. I was used to the smell of death, but nothing like this. I felt like running out. The heat was suffocating, even this early in the day, and the stench was so strong, it seemed palpable. Corpses were everywhere—on rusty examining tables and makeshift stretchers. The back wall of the room was lined with pullout compartments, which must have been crammed with stiff bodies. A thick liquid pooled around the drains.

“The AC’s broken, and the freezers haven’t worked in ages,” the old man offered as an excuse.

I indicated that it wasn’t a big deal as I suppressed an urge to hurl. He lifted the sheet covering several bodies and called me over.

“Is this him?” he asked, pointing to a corpse.

It was Drissa. The morgue attendant asked how I planned to proceed with collecting the body. I asked what he meant. He looked at the ceiling and sighed.

“We don’t have a hearse anymore. You’ll have to find a way to transport him on your own.”

He helped me carry Drissa’s body to my Toyota. I slid him into the back, wrapped in the sheet that had been used to cover him and his dead compatriots. The material was stiff with dried blood and other bodily substances. I gave the old guy a bill. He thanked me with a nod. In the light of day, he looked a little less like his tenants.

“He was your caretaker?” he asked as we were about to part ways.

“How did you know?”

“That’s what you wrote down on the form when you claimed the body.”

I nodded. “Yes, he was my caretaker and so much more than that.”

The guy gave me an appraising look.

“My nephew happens to be looking for a job.”

I shrugged, got in the car, and rolled all the windows down.

~ ~ ~

When I arrived at the Martyrs Bridge I found myself trapped in traffic. I held my head in my hands and groaned. A young traffic cop who seemed to be having no luck at getting the vehicles unsnarled walked up to my car, with his whistle between his lips.

“Everything all right, sir?” he asked, letting the whistle drop from his mouth.

I pointed my thumb at the body in the back.

“I’m taking my father home. He just died. So to answer your question, no, everything’s not all right.”

The young cop glanced behind me, nodded, and took off toward his moped.

“Follow me!” he shouted. He started up his two-wheeler and began blowing his whistle while kicking the cars to create a third lane of traffic. The other drivers glared at me as I followed.

~ ~ ~

I presented myself at my neighborhood mosque with Drissa’s body still lying in my Toyota. After I talked with the imam and made a considerable donation, we agreed to proceed with the ceremony that afternoon. The body was removed from the vehicle. With the purification process under way, I returned home for a quick bite. It looked so empty. Milo joined me in the early afternoon and accompanied me to the mosque.

I was surprised to see that a small crowd had gathered in front of the nearby cemetery. There were owners of the shops where Drissa had bought our groceries, other caretakers on our street who had enjoyed chatting with him, and neighbors for whom he had done odd jobs. They had somehow managed to spread the word. All these people lined up to give me their condolences.

When the body was lowered into the ground, only men were present. The cemetery was on the modest side, a sort of vacant terrain where the wild grass had covered most of the burial sites and created a myriad of little mounds. After the imam had chosen a location, we dug the earth with our bare hands. During the night, an abundant rainfall had made the dirt loose and our job easier. Milo and I placed my friend’s body, wrapped in a clean sheet, in the makeshift grave. We covered him with stones—so that stray animals wouldn’t dig him up—and earth that we packed down by hand. The imam formed a small pyramid with a few pebbles and asked us to kneel. Heads bowed and knees to the ground, we held hands as the imam prayed for Drissa’s soul and for his acceptance into paradise. At least, that’s what I assumed, as I didn’t understand a word of Arabic. I stayed behind for a long time after everyone else left. My knees and back were aching. I stood up with great effort and felt the Serb’s calloused hands on my shoulders.

“May the earth lay gently over you, old friend,” I said, taking one last look at the grave.